Hey, 'New York Post' editor, what were you thinking?

Apr. 22, 2013
|

Michael Wolff / Todd Plitt USA TODAY

by Michael Wolff, USA TODAY

by Michael Wolff, USA TODAY

The most peculiar media event in a pretty much non-stop show of media fumbles and embarrassments since the bombs went off in Boston, has been the New York Post's seemingly militant determination to commit some sort of journalistic suicide.

In the early hours after the Boston Marathon attack, the Post insisted that 12 people were dead and that a Saudi suspect was in custody, maintaining this story long after all official police and FBI representatives were saying, no, two dead (a third person would later die), and nobody in custody - no suspects even.

Still, the Post insisted. And when it gave up, it was at best irritable about acknowledging that it had changed its story.

The Post's editor, Col Allan, almost always willing to defend his paper and to engage his critics (he is perhaps most famous for commissioning and defending the Post's cartoon portraying President Obama as a chimpanzee), did not respond to my e-mail asking him, in effect, what was he thinking.

A day later, it got worse. Piggy-backing off user examinations of photo evidence on the site Reddit, the Post identified in a large headline two utterly innocent bystanders, publishing their pictures on the front page, as likely perpetrators, while ever so slightly qualifying this in a small caption.

It might be that no established news outlet had ever before missed the mark so often and so far, and been so wrongheaded, in such a short period of time.

It had abandoned the most ordinary cautions. At the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta, an innocent man, Richard Jewell, had been identified as a suspect.

Jewell eventually sued a wide variety of news organization, including the New York Post, and received significant settlements. In the past, this has made news organizations highly sensitive to premature identifications. But somehow, not the Post.

Nor was the identification of the subjects in the Post photo supported, as it was with Jewell in Atlanta, by official agencies. The ID was wholly unsourced and unvouched. The Post was about as far out on a limb as it is possible to journalistically go, without making it up.

This seemed more like a news operation going crazy than just even screwing up. The Post had outdone itself.

Certainly, there were other mess-ups. Several news organizations, including CNN and Fox News, went with an erroneous second-day story after the Boston bombing of someone in custody. (USATODAY.com posted a story on the erroneous custody citing AP and CNN.)

CNN, breathlessly rushing to get in front of this story, and then ridiculously and laboriously trying to modify it and explain its way out of it, caught the brunt of this ridicule.

And yet CNN's hapless moment was something like high responsibility compared with the Post's nutty gambit.

So what was it thinking?

Every traditional news organization is, arguably, a desperate entity, looking the end in the face - in a sense, none so much as the Post, a legendary money pit for its owner, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.

CNN, facing its own existential issues, was surely demonstrating its desperate ambition for a big first-report score. You could sense its hunger - there was John King's almost febrile gasping out the details - to nail the custody story. To risk it.

Indeed, the new goal, it seemed more and more since the bombing the day before, was to not only stay on top of the real-time news but to get ahead of it.

This is surely because of the converging competition - almost everybody, amateurs and professionals alike, is now working with the same real-time tools. Ownership of an event occurs in fractions of seconds.

CNN stumbled, but the Post pushed the desire to get ahead into a new realm.

This was a hail Mary pass as news. It was probably not true - but it might save the Post for another year or two if it was.

In some sense, accuracy, or truth, or caution anyway are products of what news organizations have to lose.

You discourage readers, alienate advertisers and compromise your influence by getting it wrong and looking ridiculous. But none of that matters if you're facing extinction anyway.

Indeed, the Post has seen its staff cut and many of its best reporters flee or be whittled away - some with deep police sources. Here it was trying to play its old aggressive game, but without its muscle.

On top of that, it is, hands down, the weakest paper in the News Corp stable.

The company plans to separate its entertainment assets - the Fox companies - from its newspapers, which it will roll out as an independent company later this spring. When that happens, all of the scores of papers controlled by Murdoch will have to achieve some level of self-support. Almost nobody believes the Post can get there.

You will automatically receive the VisaliaTimesDelta.com Top 5 daily email newsletter. If you don't want to receive this newsletter, you can change your newsletter selections in your account preferences.